“But there is something to be said for branding campaigns launched with Twitter’s approval and participation. Figuring out exactly how much that will be worth, and what it will eventually look like, will likely take Twitter and its ad partners a while to figure out. But now they’re starting. Finally.”

“our focused commitment to Twitter itself means we don’t have much time or resources to build these interesting topical experiences. It turns out the folks over at Federated Media have both the resources and the expertise. So if you’re a major brand and you want to sponsor a topic-focused social media experience with Twitter, we suggest Federated Media — they’ll fix you up right. Check out their first project in conjunction with Microsoft, Exectweets.com.”

Sure, anyone can make videos and put them up on YouTube. There’s a reason to partner with expert digital video programmers like Next New Networks (an FM partner), though: You significantly improve your odds of breaking through the clutter and riding the wave of a word-of-mouth phenomenon.

Final Destination movie ), a project where indie bands get creative with $99 and a video camera to produce made-for-YouTube music videos. One of them, Jeffrey Lewis & The Junkyard’s To Be Objectified video, has attracted more than 100,000 viewers (and 200 comments) in its first week. Not a bad start.

“The web’s best blogs are honored here every year at the Weblog Awards, aka “The Bloggies,” now in their ninth year. The top prize for 2009′s edition were handed out to blogger and photographer Ree Drummond for her site, Confessions of a Pioneer Woman.”

“In an increasingly personalized media landscape, the surest way for brands to engage consumers is through cause marketing, according to new analysis from IPG Emerging Media Lab’s team of digital experts.”

Also check out Deb Schultz’s postThe Chair release on the Digital Hack Night. She thinks the evening’s key take-aways had less to do with cause marketing, and more to do with the emerging culture of conversational media. Importantly, the grammar of this new culture isn’t overproduced: “Many of the P&G folks thought the first task was to figure out the messaging of the campaign, where as the external folks just dived right in in plain English.”

Maybe we all already know more about conversational marketing than we thought.

Battelle at Searchblog tells us to pay attention to what Twitter is promoting — its search engine:

Arrington at TechCrunch says this an early test for the real ads that will follow:

“The advertisements currently only link internally to Twitter Search or the Twitter Widget. But it isn’t much of a stretch to assume they’re testing the units for possible third party advertisements in the future. Twitter Japan, which launched a year ago, has included display ads from the beginning.”